Nokia just posted its quarterly results - including shipped devices - and it's not looking good. Massive losses, sales dropping, and no growth in Lumia sales in the US. The company is losing money hand-over-fist, and with Windows Phone 8 still months away, the company warns the next quarter will be just as bad.

At the time when Elop took over, Nokia was bigger than Samsung. And Samsung offers Android, Bada, WP7 and soon Tizen smartphones.

Even at Nokia's best times Samsung was many times larger than Nokia. Granted, Nokia was bigger in the mobile phone space, but Nokia is essentially a mobile phone company only. Samsung on the other hand is a multinational conglomerate with strong horizontal and vertical diversification, which also explains why Nokia can't be another Samsung.

So there is no reason why Nokia couldn't offer Android, MeeGo, Symbian and WP7. The addition of their navigation and cloud services would have been enough to distinguish them from the crowd. They could even offer MeeGo and Android on the same hardware thanks to the Linux kernel.

There are many reasons why Nokia can't and shouldn't do that but the most important one is that Nokia, compared to Samsung, has very limited resources. Thus, unlike Samsung Nokia cannot afford to scatter their resources over several platforms, especially if you intend to become the leader/owner of one of them, and hope that one of the many attempts sticks. They had to choose where to concentrate their effort. The question is, why did they chose WP?

From the outside this is hard to judge. I can think of a few good reasons why, but from the outside there seem to be equally good reasons to stick with the "Qt GUI on Meego/Symbian" strategy. For one, a jump to "Qt on Android" would have been much easier. But I'm not privy to that kind of information, so probably there is more to it.